There is no drinking-house in Saltaire, so that the vices and diseases associated with drunkenness are excluded from the locality. The diseases peculiar to poverty are also unknown in Saltaire. Everything is attended to—drainage, cleansing, and ventilation. There are baths of all kinds—plunge baths, warm baths, Turkish baths, and douche baths; and the wash-house, to enable the women to wash their clothes away from their cottages, is a great accommodation,—inasmuch as indoor washing is most pernicious, and a fruitful source of disease, especially to the young.
The workpeople are also thrifty. They invest their savings in the Penny Bank and Saving's Bank; whilst others invest in various building societies, gas companies, and other lucrative undertakings. In fact, they seem to be among the most favoured of human beings. With every convenience and necessity, as well as every proper pleasure provided for them,—with comfortable homes, and every inducement to stay at home,—with fishing clubs, boating clubs, and cricket clubs,—with schoolrooms, literary institutions, lecture-hall, museum, and class-rooms, established in their midst; and to crown all, with a beautiful temple for the worship of God,—there is no wonder that Saltaire has obtained a name, and that Sir Titus Salt has established a reputation among his fellow-men.
There are large numbers of employers who treat their workpeople quite as generously, though not in such a princely manner, as Sir Titus Salt. They pay the uniform rate of wages; help and encourage the employed to economize their surplus earnings; establish Savings Banks and Penny Banks for their use; assist them in the formation of co-operative associations for the purchase of pure food at a cheaper rate; build healthy cottages for their accommodation; erect schools for the education of their children; and assist them in every method that is calculated to promote their moral and, social improvement.
Mr. Edward Akroyd, formerly M.P. for Halifax, is another manufacturer who has exercised great influence throughout Yorkshire, by his encouragement of habits of thrift amongst working people. In his own district, at Copley and Haley Hill, near Halifax, he has built numerous excellent cottages for his workmen, and encouraged them to build their own houses by investing their spare earnings in building clubs. He has established co-operative clubs, to enable the men to purchase food and clothing at cost price. He has built excellent schools at his own expense, and provided them with a paid staff of teachers. He has built and endowed the very fine church of "All Souls" (Sir Gilbert Scott, architect), to which a large district, inclusive of the works, has been assigned. He has provided for his workpeople, both at Haley Hill and Copley, a Literary and Scientific Society, a Mutual Improvement Society, a Working Men's Library (to which he has presented more than five thousand books), a Working Men's Club and Newsroom, a Choral Society, supplied with an excellent library of music; a Recreation Club, provided with a bowling green; and a cricket ground, with quoits, and gymnastic apparatus, Mr. Akroyd has also allotted a large field to his workmen, dividing it into small gardens varying from a hundred to two hundred and forty square yards each. The small rent charged for each plot is distributed in prizes given at an annual flower-show held in his grounds, for the best growers of flowers, plants, and vegetables. Hence the Haley Hill Horticultural and Floral Society, one of the most thriving institutions of the kind in the neighbourhood. In short, Mr. Akroyd has done everything that a wise and conscientious master could have done, for the purpose of promoting the moral and spiritual welfare of the four thousand persons employed in his manufactories, who have been virtually committed to his charge.
But although Mr. Akroyd has done so much as a master for the men and women employed by him, he has perhaps done still more as a public benefactor by establishing the Yorkshire Penny Bank for Savings. As early as the year 1852, Mr. Akroyd instituted a Savings Bank to enable his workpeople to deposit sums of from one penny upwards. The system was found to work so well, and to have such a beneficial effect in making people provident, that he conceived the idea of extending its operations throughout the West Riding of Yorkshire. Having obtained the co-operation of several influential gentlemen, the scheme was started in 1856, and an Act of Parliament was obtained for constituting the Yorkshire Penny Savings Bank as it now exists.
Mr. Akroyd has recently furnished an Introduction to the narrative of the Yorkshire Penny Bank, from which we extract the following passage:—
"The way by which thoughts, or chance suggestions, enter into the minds of men, is sometimes passing strange! They may be the offspring of wayward fancy; or they may be the whisperings from a higher source. To the latter cause I am willing to attribute the idea which flashed across my mind during the present year to give to the public something beyond the bare outline of the scheme, in which, for years, many of them have taken a warm personal interest.
"It occurred in this wise. When in town, I occasionally attended, during Lent, the services at Whitehall Chapel, for the sake of hearing a Lenten sermon preached by one of Her Majesty's chaplains. One remarkable sermon of the series was delivered by the Rev. Charles Kingsley, on the 12th of March, on behalf of the Supplemental Ladies' Association of the London Society of Parochial Mission Women. In the sketch which the preacher gave of this excellent institution, he referred to a book entitled 'East and West,' in which the benefits derived by the London poor from the association are clearly set forth; but he dwelt chiefly on the wide separation which divides rich from poor, class from class, in London; and on the dangers which threaten Society from this cause, as was recently exemplified in France. Such was the impression made upon me by the sermon, that, before many days had elapsed, I had purchased 'East and West,' and given the book a careful perusal.
"From previous observation I had been struck with the sad contrast between the luxurious lives of those who reside at the West End of London, and the struggle for a hard, wretched existence which the crowded poor at the East, or in close purlieus elsewhere, are obliged to maintain until death closes the scene. How to bridge over the wide chasm intervening between the extremes of high and low in society, without injury to self-respect on either side, was the puzzling question, the problem to be solved. Yet, from the admirable introduction to this most useful little work, by the Countess Spencer, it appeared that a lady of high rank, and her noble-minded associates, had in some measure solved the problem, and bridged over the chasm.
"Hence I was led to reflect how much easier it is to discharge our duty to our neighbours, and to fulfil the leading object of the Parochial Mission Women Association, to 'help the poor to help themselves,' in provincial towns and in the country, where we are personally acquainted with each other, than in London, where we do not know our next-door neighbour. To help the poor to help themselves is the cardinal principle of the Yorkshire Penny Bank."[1]